Google suffers worldwide outages

The day the net nearly died: Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps suffer

Reports around the world suggest that Google suffered a massive outage today, with all of its major networks failing to load in most parts of the US.

Although the UK seemed to be unaffected, Twitter (#googlefail) was ablaze with people suggesting that service has also gone down in parts of Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and China.

Outage confirmed

While there's no confirmation about what is causing the outage, the Internet Storm Center, which "provides a free analysis and warning service to thousands of internet users and organisations" has had it confirmed that some of Google's service were down, including Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps and even YouTube.

Some theories regarding why Google stopped working (or ground to a sluggish pace) are that AT&T's web network went down and, more interestingly, it could be the work of a DDoS or even the Conficker virus.

TechRadar will keep you updated as and when we hear anything more. For the time-being, ZDnet has pointed out an interesting site to see which areas are effected, just click your browser to just-ping.com.